Memoirs of a Polar Bear
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- 17,99 €
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- 17,99 €
Descrição da editora
Someone tickled me behind my ears, under my arms. I curled up, became a full moon, and rolled on the floor. I may also have emitted a few hoarse shrieks. Then I lifted my rump to the sky and tucked my head beneath my belly: Now I was a sickle moon, still too young to imagine any danger. Innocent, I opened my anus to the cosmos and felt it in my bowels.
A bear, born and raised in captivity, is devastated by the loss of his keeper; another finds herself performing in the circus; a third sits down one day and pens a memoir which becomes an international sensation, and causes her to flee her home.
Through the stories of these three bears, Tawada reflects on our own humanity, the ways in which we belong to one another and the ways in which we are formed. Delicate and surreal, Memoirs of a Polar Bear takes the reader into foreign bodies and foreign climes, and immerses us in what the New Yorker has called 'Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness'.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written by acclaimed Japanese-German author Tawada, this immersive, dreamy novel follows three generations of a polar bear family grandmother, daughter, son as each tries to balance the public pressures of circus performing with the solitary satisfactions of a literary life. In the first section, the family's matriarch pens an acclaimed autobiography, Thunderous Applause for My Tears, which her agent, a wily sea lion, publishes without her permission. After emigrating to Canada in order to escape the oppressive heat of Berlin, she gives birth to Tosca, whose section focuses on the life of Barbara, Tosca's innovative animal trainer. In the final section, Tosca bears Knut, an emblem for the polar bear's plight and the ward of Matthias, his beloved caretaker. When Matthias dies suddenly, Knut must reckon with the renown of the estranged women who came before him, as well as his species's shrinking place in a warming world. Though the sapien-centric middle portion pales in comparison, the first and third sections present a poignant blend of history and fairy tale, an inventive account of beasts often too humane for their own good.
